1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an article confirmation method and its device, and particularly to a method for confirming the authenticity of an article and its device.
2. Related Art
Conventionally, in order to prevent the forgery of an article of value, an important document and the like, there has been generally employed a method of recording identification code using a sophisticated printing technique or a special ink rarely offered in markets on a surface of an genuine article such as an article of value and an important document, or a method of sticking a forgery preventing sheet such as a hologram thereto. In these methods, once a pretender has learned the sophisticated printing technique, or the manufacturing technique of the special ink or the forgery preventing sheet, a massive amount of forgery is performed.
Therefore, in recent years, as a technique for making the forgery difficult, there is proposed a technique of embedding a thin, minute non-contact IC chip in which a unique ID is stored into a genuine article (in the case of a document, a unique ID is mixed into paper) (e.g. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (JP-A) No. 2001-283011, JP-A No. 2001-357377, JP-A No. 11-277963). In this technique, in particular, the authenticity of an article can be confirmed by using the non-contact IC chip without contacting it, so that a user does not need to do the work of placing the article into a device for confirming the authenticity, which improves convenience.
In the related art, the IC chip is required for each article, and a special process for embedding the IC chip at a manufacturing step is required, which disadvantageously increases the costs. Furthermore, a case where, after manufacturing the article, forgery prevention becomes necessary due to marketed forgery or the like cannot be addressed. Also, once a pretender has learned the manufacturing technique of the IC chip or the embedding technique, the forgery becomes possible, so that the forgery cannot be securely prevented.
Therefore, while a method of confirming the authenticity of an article using irreproducible fine characteristics (random pattern) that the article itself possesses, for example, a pattern of micro asperity on a surface or the like is considered, confirmation precision is low in this method. Specifically, the irreproducible random pattern that the article itself possesses is changed when flaws are caused or dirt sticks to the surface of the article, which disables the confirmation of the authenticity. Further, since this random pattern is also changed by change in shape of the article, it cannot be applied to an article changing its shape such as fabric products and leather products.